Hi David ----

>In addition to other coments, APPEND BLANK has a performance penalty; the index(es) have to be updated twice. INSERT INTO does a single index update, which means it's *about* twice as fast.
>Unfortunately there's no INSERT INTO FROM NAME objectname, which would be nice since they introduced SCATTER NAME objectname.

Ahhh, but there is a GATHER NAME :-)
Thats the compliment to SCATTER NAME.